Dot Mac

Before MobileMe there was .Mac, and before there was iWeb, there was .Mac HomePage. Well, good thing the latter has been replaced 'cause Apple is officially declaring them EOL (end of life) come July 7. After that date, whatever is there will remain there forever (or until Apple gets tired of it and yanks them down). So get with converting to iWeb or rolling yourself something custom.

Apple's brand new MobileMe News (formerly MobileMe Updates) is back with their second post this week (and luckily for links, finally sporting unique URLs to boot!). The subject of their latest post? How previous .Mac users can keep using their @mac.com addresses on the iPhone post-MobileMe transition:

This is it. We're in the home stretch. Games in overtime, the shot clock is almost done, and Steve Jobs is soaring from mid-court looking for the slam dunk. In 3 days we find out if Apple brings down the net, the two-peat for smartphone (even gadget) championship, or if they bounce it off the rim (pun sorta intended) with their mostly evolutionary, not so much revolutionary, next generation handset.

Now word comes that, to accommodate New Zealand, which due to their time zone gets the iPhone 3G way before anyone else, Apple has announced that it's really not 3 days to MobileMe -- just one! That's right, MobileMe goes live on Wednesday, July 9 between 6pm and 12am PST. Mark your calendars, then get ready to "push" sync them!

.Mac has been up and down again over the last few days, which is nothing new, but this time it seems like the transition to MobileMe might actually have begun. Some people are reportedly able to receive mail at the me.com version of their alias (meaning name@mac.com is already mapping to name@me.com for some).

I just tried it, and received an "illegal alias" error for my trouble. Is it working yet for you?

Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That's when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.

Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).

We've gone over just how bad the Mobile Me brand sounds to us a couple of times already (almost as bad as this week's service!), but now reports surface that there may just be something better hidden beneath the bad label:

Do you use Apple’s .Mac Services? I do. I like the synchronization between my Macs; it really makes life easy. With the iPhone, I really get a lot of benefit. I can add a website, Calendar appointments, Address Book entry, etc on my iPhone and it gets synced across multiple machines.